Reese

MICHELLE Keegan gushed over Hollywood superstar, Reese Witherspoon, at a glitzy event in London.

The Brassic actress posed with the Academy Award winning star and they were seen getting on very well as they chatted excitedly.

She met Reese at an event for her new book, Gone Before Goodbye, which she co-authored with best selling crime author, Harlen Coben.

Michelle recently starred in Fool Me Once, one of Harlen’s many adapted series on Netflix.

She shared a series of photos of her posing closely with Reese and another video of her chatting with Reese as Harlen watched on happily.

“When two genuises collide.. ‘Gone Before Goodbye’ is made! 📖 (I can confirm Reese Witherspoon is everything you’d imagined her to be, what a woman),” Michelle captioned the post on Instagram.

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Reese later responded to her post writing, “So wonderful to meet you .. finally!”

Gone Before Goodbye is Reese’s debut novel and tells the story of surgeon Maggie who after a series of personal tragedies is offered an intriguing opportunity by a former colleague.

Michelle also shared a series of her posing at the Southbank Centre in London where the event was held.

Her brush with Hollywood royalty comes after The Sun was first to reveal how Michelle’s BBC series Ten Pound Poms had been scrapped after two series.

The show’s axe comes as the ex-Coronation Street star waves goodbye to hit comedy Brassic on Sky, just as she’s returning to work after becoming a first time mum, to daughter Palma Elizabeth.

Period drama Ten Pound Poms followed a group of British citizens who emigrated from post-war Britain to Australia in the 1950s, with Michelle playing nurse Kate Thorne.

A BBC spokesperson said: “It’s been a joy to bring the story of the Ten Pound Poms to life for BBC viewers and we are really grateful to Danny Brocklehurst, Eleven and all the cast and crew who have worked on the series.”

The gentle drama made a splash when it first aired in May 2023, with 6.37million viewers but that had halved to 3.15million by the end of series two in April this year.

She is busy on a new thriller called The Blame for ITV, though, after time off to have baby Palma with husband Mark Wright.

HOLLYWOOD star Reese Witherspoon is shaken and stirred by James Bond films — saying they objectify women in bikinis.

The Oscar winner, 49, blasted Bond Girls such as Halle Berry and Ursula Andress.

She said: “Women deserve better stories because women save the day all the time.

“We are not wearing bikinis while we do it.”

Reese was in London to plug her co-written novel Gone Before Goodbye.

Reese Witherspoon is best known for her roles in Legally Blonde, critically-acclaimed Walk the Line, and the dark comedy Cruel Intentions.

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She’s been taking home awards since 2006 including Academy Awards, BAFTAs, Teen Choice Awards, and Golden Globes.

She’s set to feature on a new series of The Morning Show alongside Jennifer Aniston.

Her first break came when she appeared in several local TV adverts at just age seven.

She was soon securing major movie roles as a teenager and throughout the 1990s. 

Victoria’s Secret called game.

WNBA player Angel Reese and Olympic gymnast Suni Lee walked the 2025 edition of the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show on Wednesday, becoming the first major athletes to hit the runway at the lingerie and loungewear brand’s signature event.

Reese, a forward for the Chicago Sky, was part of the high-profile “Wings Reveal” lineup, with the two-time All-Star debuting two looks at the event. The first was a pink floral lingerie set paired with a feathered stole, while the second featured the brand’s iconic angel wings. She is the first professional athlete to walk the show.

“It was destined for me,” Reese reportedly said in an interview before the show kicked off. “This is already for me. I’m so happy to be sitting in this room with so many amazing models and women. The team that put this all together has been amazing. I’m so excited.”

Angel Reese debuted two looks at the 2025 Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show.

(Evan Agostini / Invision / Associated Press)

The 2025 Victoria Secret’s Fashion Show may have marked her professional modeling debut, but Reese has long been a fashion icon. She’s known for her sharp arrival looks as much as her rebounding prowess among women’s basketball fans and she even served as a member of the 2025 Met Gala’s host committee. Reese capped off her standout college career, which included an NCAA championship title with Louisiana State University in 2023, by declaring for the WNBA draft in a 2024 Vogue interview and has since graced that magazine’s cover.

Two-time Olympian Lee, meanwhile, made her fashion show debut as part of the segment dedicated to VS’ Pink line, sporting short shorts and a pink hoodie adorned with miniature wings. She hit the runway while four members of the K-pop group Twice were performing live.

Suni Lee makes her Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show debut.

(Dimitrios Kambouris / Getty Images for Victoria’s Secret)

“Stepping into something like the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show felt like a dream outside of my comfort zone … But that’s exactly why I said yes,” Lee told Marie Claire in an interview before the show where she described her runway look as “sporty meets glam in the best way.”

Lee, of course, was part of the “Golden Girls” squad alongside Simone Biles that brought home the team gold at the 2024 Paris Olympics. Among her six Olympic medals is also the all-around gold from the 2020 Games in Tokyo, which were held in 2021 due to pandemic restrictions. The Minnesota native also competed as part of Auburn University’s gymnastics team.

Over the last decade or so, publishers of American genre fiction have borrowed a page from Hollywood’s playbook by essentially packaging novels like films, grafting together collaborators from two different A-lists: those that feature bestselling novelists and major celebrities. Large commercial rewards have been reaped from these crossbred literary partnerships. Bill and Hillary Clinton, to name just two examples, have both enjoyed bestsellers with big-time writing partners James Patterson and Louise Penny, respectively.

Now we have Reese Witherspoon, already a major force in American publishing, teaming up with Harlan Coben, one of the world’s biggest selling thriller writers, to create “Gone Before Goodbye,” a book that taps into our fascination with the follies of the impossibly rich at the same time that it ponders real questions about the ethics of social engineering via medical advances in organ regeneration.

Now, it must be said that book critics are cynical snobs by nature, and something like “Gone Before Goodbye,” which at first blush seems to have been a project drummed up in a talent agency conference room, is prone to be received with a derisory scoff and a stiff-armed shove from those who are just waiting to sink their teeth into the new Thomas Pynchon novel. But this is Harlan Coben and Reese Witherspoon we’re talking about here, two formidable talents whose track record for delivering smart entertainment is unimpeachable. “Gone Before Goodbye” is not some magpie creature patched together from shopworn thriller tropes, even if certain plot elements feel a bit much. Instead, what the two authors have delivered is a story that pulls the reader deep into a rarefied world where ethics are mere technicalities and the needs of the rich take precedence over petty trivialities like, say, morality.

The book’s protagonist, Maggie McCabe, a brilliant Army combat surgeon who, along with her husband, Marc, and their friend Trace, teamed up after college to create WorldCures Alliance, “one of the world’s most dynamic charities, specializing in providing medical services for the most impoverished,” working as field surgeons risking their lives on the front lines in Afghanistan and the Middle East. The trio once had big plans centered on the prototype of an artificial heart they designed, THUMPR7, which they were convinced would change the world by extending the lives of millions, rich, poor or otherwise.

When the book begins, these plans have been torn asunder: Marc, as it transpires, has been killed in a rebel attack on a refugee camp in Libya. Trace has gone missing along with the artificial heart prototype. And Maggie has lost her medical license due to a hiccup of bad judgment on her part. At loose ends and broke, Maggie, and the reader, are then swept into a strange adventure when a successful cosmetic surgeon named Evan Barlow approaches her with an offer to wipe out her family’s debts in exchange for Maggie committing to perform surgery for a client in Russia who is willing to pay her millions.

Off Maggie goes into the dirty world of the Russian oligarchy, in a city called Rublevka, “perhaps the wealthiest residential area in the world,” where a shady creep named Oleg Ragoravich, one of the 10 wealthiest and most reclusive Russian billionaires, has a job for her. It’s well below Maggie’s pay grade: Oleg wants augmentation mammoplasty for his mistress Nadia. Ragoravich is predictably oleaginous, a man with a file cabinet full of hidden agendas, but he is charmingly persuasive, and the money has already been wired into Maggie’s account. She is in before she even has a chance to back out.

Naturally, there is a great deal more involved than a simple boob job. Without giving too much away, Witherspoon and Coben in this novel have tapped into the wealthy’s obsession with using technology to foster super-agers. As the stakes get higher, the plot ripples out into larger and larger concentric circles that envelop Maggie’s life and everyone in it. But there is so much to take in while this happens, so much voyeuristic pleasure to be had as Maggie acclimates into an almost impossibly lush and lavish world that toggles between Russia and Dubai, the de facto playground for raffish oligarchs intent on bad behavior.

Witherspoon and Coben revel in the details. The plane that spirits Maggie from New York to Russia is a “full-size 180-seat Airbus A320 renovated for private use,” kitted out with a 65-inch contoured TV, a gourmet kitchen and a marble ensuite bathroom with an “oversize rain showerhead.” Ragoravich’s dacha is a “garish and almost grotesque” palace clad in marble that makes Maggie think of Versailles, but in a way that makes Versailles seem dumpy. Everything within is “not so much an attempt to classily suggest opulence and power as to batter you with it.” This is the kind of thriller that invites you into a gilded empyrean that compels you and repels you in equal measure.

The book’s plot mechanics hum along with great pace and verve, even if a few of its particulars are too far-fetched to swallow. With “Gone Before Goodbye,” the two authors deliver a fun ride into a shadow land where the rich are convinced that money can insulate them from everything, including their own mortality — even if they have to murder a few people to get there.

Weingarten is the author of “Thirsty: William Mulholland, California Water, and the Real Chinatown.”

Chicago Sky star Angel Reese says she has apologized to her teammates for a Chicago Tribune article in which she criticized the organization and indicated she might eventually leave the team “if things don’t pan out.”

Following the Sky’s 88-64 victory over the Connecticut Sun on Wednesday night, Reese was asked by a reporter about the frustration she seemed to express in the article, which was published earlier that day.

“I don’t think I’m frustrated. I probably am frustrated [with] myself right now,” Reese said during a postgame news conference.“I think the language is taken out of context, and I really didn’t intentionally mean to put down my teammates, because they’ve been through this with me throughout the whole year. They’ve busted their a—, just how I bust my a—, they showed up for me through thick and thin, and in the locker room when nobody could see anything.

“So I would apologize to my teammates, which I already have, about the article and how it was misconstrued about what was said, and I just have to be better with my language because I know it’s not the message, it’s the messenger and understanding what I say can be taken any kind of way so I just have to be better and grow from this.”

First-year coach Tyler Marsh told reporters he spoke with Reese concerning the article before the game.

“That will stay between me and Angel,” Marsh said of that discussion. “But I think that everyone had their opportunities to speak. And we’ll leave it at that.”

Selected by Chicago at No. 7 overall in the 2024 draft, Reese averaged 13.6 points and a league-record 131 rebounds and finished second to Caitlin Clark of the Indiana Fever in voting for rookie of the year . This year, Reese is averaging 14.7 points and 12.6 rebounds and was an All-Star selection for the second time.

The Sky, however, have missed the playoffs both years. They finished 13-27 in 2024 and are currently 10-30 with four games remaining this season. Injuries were a factor this year — star point guard Courtney Vandersloot suffered a season-ending ACL injury after seven games and Reese missed three weeks with a back injury — but Reese told the Tribune that the organization needs to do better.

“I’m not settling for the same s— we did this year,” Reese said. “We have to get good players. We have to get great players. That’s a non-negotiable for me.

“I’m willing and wanting to play with the best. And however I can help to get the best here, that’s what I’m going to do this offseason. So it’s going to be very, very important this offseason to make sure we attract the best of the best because we can’t settle for what we have this year.”

Reese’s rookie contract with the Sky runs through the 2027 season, with the final year being a team option.

“I’d like to be here for my career, but if things don’t pan out, obviously I might have to move in a different direction and do what’s best for me,” Reese told the Tribune. “But while I am here, I’m going to try to stay open-minded about what I have here and maximize that as much as I can.”

The Tribune also stated that Reese wants Marsh to coach players harder.

“I think that everyone is entitled to feel how they feel,” Marsh said of that portion of the article. “For me, the most important thing is staying authentic and genuine to who I am and have that translate in whatever way it translates.

“But I think the overarching theme is that none of us are happy with where we’re at in terms of what our record has been. That’s the core of where frustration is organizationally. We’ve just got to continue to finish this season strong.”

A WNBA investigation was unable to substantiate a “report of racist fan behavior in the vicinity of the court” during a game between the Chicago Sky and Indiana Fever on May 17 in Indianapolis.

The investigation reportedly was started in response to allegations that a fan had made racist comments toward Sky star Angel Reese. It remains unclear as to who made the allegations.

“Based on information gathered to date, including from relevant fans, team and arena staff, as well as audio and video review of the game, we have not substantiated it,” the league said Tuesday in a statement. “The WNBA is committed to fostering a safe and inclusive environment for everyone and will continue to be vigilant in enforcing our fan code of conduct.”

Reese remained reticent about the situation. The second-year player responded that she was “focused on the game today” when asked about the league’s findings before the Sky’s game Tuesday night in Phoenix. Reese said she was more concerned with helping her team achieve its first win of the season.

Chicago coach Tyler Marsh said he felt the same way before Tuesday’s game.

“We appreciate the investigation being done and we hope that the league continues to make the steps necessary moving forward to ensure a safe environment for everyone, all players included,” he said. “But tonight, the focus is on the game.”

The Sky ended up losing to the Mercury 94-89 to drop to 0-4 this season, but Reese made WNBA history by becoming the player to reach 500 points and 500 rebounds the fastest. She finished the game with 13 points and 15 rebounds to bring her totals in both categories to 502 after 38 career games.

The season-opening game on May 17 was the latest marquee matchup between Reese and Fever star Caitlin Clark. During the third quarter, Reese appeared upset after Clark committed a flagrant 1 foul on her. After the game, however, Reese referred to Clark’s foul as a “basketball play” and added that the ‘‘refs got it right.”

Clark said after the game that she “wasn’t trying to do anything malicious.”

The WNBA announced its investigation the next day, on May 18.

“The WNBA strongly condemns racism, hate and discrimination in all forms — they have no place in our league or in society,” the league’s statement read. “We are aware of the allegations and are looking into the matter.”

The Women’s National Basketball Players Assn. said in a statement the same day, specifying that the league was investigating “hateful comments” allegedly made at the Fever-Sky game. Multiple media outlets added detail, reporting that the alleged comments were racial and directed at Reese.

A fan allegedly made racist comments toward Chicago Sky star Angel Reese during the team’s season opener against the Indiana Fever on Saturday at Gainbridge Fieldhouse.

“The WNBA strongly condemns racism, hate and discrimination in all forms — they have no place in our league or in society,” the WNBA said in a statement released Sunday. “We are aware of the allegations and are looking into the matter.”

The WNBA told The Times on Monday that it has no further comment at this time.

The Women’s National Basketball Players Assn. said in a statement Sunday that the league was investigating “hateful comments” made at the Fever-Sky game. Multiple media outlets were reporting that the comments were racial and directed at Reese.

“The WNBPA is aware of reports of hateful comments at yesterday’s game in Indianapolis and suppports the WNBA’s current investigation into this matter,” the union wrote Sunday. “Such behavior is unacceptable in our sport.”

Both teams issued statements supporting the WNBA’s investigation into what they characterized as fan misconduct.

“We will do everything in our power to protect Chicago Sky players,” team president and CEO Adam Fox stated, “and we encourage the league to continue taking meaningful steps to create a safe environment for all WNBA players.”

Pacers Sports & Entertainment CEO Mel Raines said: “We stand firm in our commitment to providing a safe environment for all WNBA players.”

In the latest marquee matchup between Reese and the Fever’s Caitlin Clark, Reese appeared upset after Clark committed a hard foul on her.

During the third quarter of the Fever’s 93-58 win, Clark sent Reese, who had just pulled in an offensive rebound, to the floor. Reese got up and tried to confront Clark, who walked away as members from both teams intervened. Clark’s foul was eventually upgraded to a flagrant 1, while Reese and Indiana’s Aliyah Boston were given technical fouls.

After the game, Reese referred to Clark’s foul as a “basketball play.”

‘‘Refs got it right,” she said. “Move on.’’

Clark told reporters of the incident: “Let’s not make it something that it’s not. It was just a good play on the basketball. I’m not sure what the ref saw to upgrade it, and that’s up to their discretion. … It’s a take foul to put them at the free-throw line rather than give up two points, you know? I’ve watched a lot of basketball in my life, that’s exactly what it was. I wasn’t trying to do anything malicious. That’s not the type of player I am. It wasn’t anything like that.”

The rivalry between the two players gained widespread attention in 2023, when Reese’s LSU Tigers defeated Clark’s Iowa Hawkeyes in the NCAA tournament championship game. It carried over to the WNBA for the players’ rookie season last year, although both insisted that there are no personal hard feelings.

Clark was named the league’s rookie of the year, with Reese finishing second in the voting.

The presence of both players helped propel the league into unprecedented popularity. With the additional attention, however, came a negative aspect, as some players spoke about experiencing an increasing amount of racism online and in person throughout the season.

The WNBA has launched the “No Space for Hate” campaign this year to help fight hate and promote tolerance and respect.